How do children construct linguistic color categories?

孩子们如何构建语言颜色类别？

• 批准号: 1535093
• 负责人: David Barner
• 金额: $ 40万
• 依托单位: University of California-San Diego
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-08-01 至 2019-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1535093&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: How; do; children; construct; linguistic

When children learn a new word, such as the name for an object, they must then figure out what other objects should receive this same label. This can be an especially challenging problem for color words because different examples of the same color category can vary widely and the exact boundaries of individual color labels are not obvious. For example, once a child learns that blue can refer to the color of the sky, she must also determine whether blueberries, grapes or grass receive the same label. Although the boundaries for what differentiates blue from purple or green seem straightforward to adults, children experience some ambiguity, and different cultures actually employ different color categories with different boundaries. For example, some cultures refer to blue and green things with the same color label. Thus, to learn color terms, children must figure out where blue begins and ends. The current research investigates how children solve this complex problem by examining color word learning in speakers of English and Otji-Herero. Otji-Herero is spoken by the Himba, an ethnic group in rural Namibia, and contains only 5 color terms to cover the same range of colors that English speakers typically label using 11 terms (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, gray, black and white). The research investigates how differences in exposure to visual colors, combined with differently sized and structured color vocabularies, affect how individuals establish color word categories.The project will investigate how learners encode color with language in three parts. First, it will test children's early comprehension using infant-friendly eye-tracking methods to determine the initial assumptions that guide first color word meanings in English-learning children (18-30 months). Second, the project will test longitudinal category change. To do so, the researchers will follow children from the time they produce their first color words until they acquire adult-like meanings for all 11 English basic color terms. Finally, these naturalistic studies of category change will be complemented by studies of experimental categorical change in which researchers introduce new color words to individuals who have divided their color space into 5 (Otji-Herero) or 11 (as in English) words while manipulating the type of visual evidence they receive during training. The researchers will also photograph the learning environments of participants to test how visual experience impacts changes in color word meanings. These photographs will be used to create a valuable online database as a resource for other researchers. Using these visual images as well as existing databases on children's linguistic input, the researchers will construct a computational model of how learners use visual and linguistic information to construct color word meanings.

当孩子们学习一个新单词（例如某个物体的名称）时，他们必须弄清楚其他哪些物体应该获得相同的标签。 对于颜色词来说，这可能是一个特别具有挑战性的问题，因为同一颜色类别的不同示例可能差异很大，并且各个颜色标签的确切边界并不明显。例如，一旦孩子了解到蓝色可以指天空的颜色，她还必须确定蓝莓、葡萄或草是否有相同的标签。尽管区分蓝色、紫色或绿色的界限对于成年人来说似乎很简单，但孩子们却感到有些模糊，而且不同的文化实际上采用具有不同界限的不同颜色类别。 例如，某些文化使用相同颜色标签来指代蓝色和绿色的事物。因此，要学习颜色术语，孩子们必须弄清楚蓝色从哪里开始和结束。目前的研究通过检查英语和奥吉-赫雷罗语使用者的颜色词学习情况来调查儿童如何解决这个复杂的问题。 Otji-Herero 是辛巴族（纳米比亚农村地区的一个民族）的语言，仅包含 5 个颜色术语，涵盖英语使用者通常使用 11 个术语（红色、橙色、黄色、绿色、蓝色、紫色、粉色、棕色、灰色、黑色和白色）。该研究调查了视觉颜色暴露的差异以及不同大小和结构的颜色词汇如何影响个人建立颜色词类别的方式。该项目将分三个部分研究学习者如何用语言编码颜色。首先，它将使用适合婴儿的眼球追踪方法来测试儿童的早期理解能力，以确定指导英语学习儿童（18-30 个月）的第一个颜色词含义的初始假设。其次，项目将测试纵向品类变化。为此，研究人员将从孩子们说出第一个颜色词开始对其进行跟踪，直到他们获得所有 11 个英语基本颜色词的成人般的含义。最后，这些类别变化的自然主义研究将得到实验类别变化研究的补充，其中研究人员向将其颜色空间划分为 5 个（Otji-Herero）或 11 个（如英语）单词的个人介绍新的颜色词，同时操纵他们在训练期间收到的视觉证据类型。研究人员还将拍摄参与者的学习环境，以测试视觉体验如何影响颜色词含义的变化。这些照片将用于创建一个有价值的在线数据库，作为其他研究人员的资源。利用这些视觉图像以及现有的儿童语言输入数据库，研究人员将构建一个计算模型，展示学习者如何使用视觉和语言信息来构建颜色词的含义。